To RAID or not to RAID ??

Hi,

I know there were many discussions and threads on this topic. My apologies for reigniting the topic. I am looking for people who have used RAID for building data warehouse.

We are designing and building a data warehouse about the size of 40-60 GB on Oracle 7.3.2. Based on my research on this topic I believe RAID-5 is most suitable in this case. But the hardware vendor providing the machine has installed RAID-1 (disk mirroring) and vehemently opposes changing this to RAID-5 on the basis that their experience tells them that RAID-5 gives a very poor performance for any database applications, including data warehousing. Also I received recommendation on using a combination of RAID-0+1 (stripping and mirroring).

I would really appreciate if any of you could share your experiences with RAID-1 or RAID-5 or RAID-0+1 while building or using data warehouses or any database. Here is the set up we have:

• HP9000/K260 Server
• PA 8000 180 MHz processor (2 of them)
• HP-UX 10.2
• 384 MB memory
• Database: Oracle 7.3.2